Against the Current No. 232, September/October 2024

Election 2024: What are our options?

FACING THE HIDEOUS specter of a second Trump presidency, the operational leadership of the Democratic Party — that is, the party mega-donors — ultimately took the reins and pushed aside its all-too-visibly declining incumbent standard-bearer. From the voting base on July 21 came the instant response: “Free at last, free at last  thank God Almighty (and Covid), we’re free of Biden at last!”...

WE PRESENT HERE three perspectives on options for the left in the November U.S. presidential election. The authors are members of Solidarity who gave opening remarks in a June 30 session for members and friends of the organization. The views expressed are their own.

The discussion was held after the infamous Biden-Trump debate, but of course prior to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, the Republican convention, and the escalating appeals within the Democratic Party for Biden to “pass...

WITH VICE-PRESIDENT Kamala Harris now the Democratic Party candidate, there was first a sigh of relief and then a burst of enthusiasm among Democrats. Many Democrats now say, “we just might be able to win.”

After President Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in his first debate with former president Donald Trump, followed by the failed assassination....

Jill Stein and the Green Party have worked to be on the ballot but find Democratic Party operatives seek to have them disqualified.

AS SOCIALISTS, HOW should we approach the 2024 presidential election? The two major parties, ideologically capitalist to their cores, present us with a choice between a neoliberal corporate militarist and a neofascist criminal maniac.

As I write this (July 7), Democratic leaders and donors are fighting over whether to replace Biden after his shockingly bad debate performance on June 27. But a younger, more vigorous candidate will still be a tribune for the neoliberal and imperialist policies of the Democratic Party and its big donors in the corporate power elite....

AS VOTERS, REVOLUTIONARY socialists will face the same choice as all other voters in the United States this November: which candidate is the lesser evil, which one represents the greatest threat?...

Sonya Massey

POLICE ONCE AGAIN show their true colors: shooting in the face and killing a 36-year-old Black mother, Sonya Massey, in her own home in Springfield, Illinois. On July 6 Massey called 911 for fear of an intruder, and became the victim.

A police videocam (released to the family 11 days later) from the other deputy on the scene showed when the two cops entered Massey’s home. Deputy Sheriff Sean Grayson, with a long record of abuse, fired shots that hit Massey in the face....

RISING TEMPERATURES, EXPERTS argue, will cause substantial changes to the trans-Himalayan Indus River System by 2050, and lead to water scarcity, er­ratic droughts and floods, loss of biodiversity, and deleterious impacts on 300 million people in India and Pakistan who depend on its rivers for sustenance.

To minimize these impacts, experts recommend climate-proofing the Indus Water Treaty (IWT), a treaty that was brokered by the World Bank in 1960 to avert water wars between India and Pakistan...

A FEW MONTHS before I traveled to the Spanish town of Portbou, my friend Rashid confessed that he wanted to kill himself.

Rashid had been my student at the American University of Afghanistan when I lived and worked in Kabul....

Amilcar Cabral at the 1964 Cassacá Congress.

ANTI-COLONIALIST AND anti-imperialist, party organizer and guerilla warfare strategist, diplomat and publicist, revolutionary theorist and internationalist, Amílcar Cabral was among the most original Marxists of the 20th century.

Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral was born on September 12, 1924 in the town of Bafata in Portuguese Guinea, wedged between what was....

Harvard Commencement Protest, 1985. Man on right is FBI agent shadowing protesters.

STUDENT ENCAMPMENTS ARE springing up in U.S. universities and now (May, 2024) here in Montréal. They are denouncing apartheid in Israel. They are demanding an end to Israel’s war against Palestine. They want their universities to divest from Israel.

Apartheid. Divestment. Déjà vu. Today’s protests awaken memories from 39 years ago and move me to share personal experience and ways the past is present: then, the brutal legacy of colonialism in South Africa, now a similar legacy in Israel and Palestine....

“…the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe.”
—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952

Written in Honor of Noam Chomsky....

V.I. Lenin Graphic: Lisa Lyons

PART ONE OF this essay, in ATC 231, July-August 2024, highlights the key kernels of wisdom that Marx and Engels bequeathed about the revolutionary employment of the electoral and parliamentary arenas, and the lessons Lenin distilled about the more than decade-long Bolshevik experience in their application for proletarian ascent for the first time. Part Two purports to make an original contribution to Marxist political theory by, first, putting a label on what Marx, Engels and Lenin concluded and, second, making a case for the political currency of such a label....

Born in Blackness:
Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World,
1471 to the Second World War
By Howard W. French
W.W. Norton (Liveright), 544 pages, 2021 hardback, 2024, paperback $19.95.

HOWARD W. FRENCH’S Born in Blackness provides a sprawling, 500-page account of the fateful engagement between Europe and “Sub-Saharan”(1) Africa, laying out the argument that their twinned and tragic history set the foundations for the modern age. (3)

French constructs the main narrative arc of the story by recounting a broad sample of the historical scholarship on this multifaceted subject, threaded through with the experiences and insights of his own travels across the Atlantic World, often personally visiting the sites most prominently featured in the book....

Forgotten Populists:
When Farmers Turned Left to Save Democracy
By Steve Babson
Mission Point Press, Traverse City, Michigan 2023,
65 pages with graphics, 8 x 11, $14.95 paperback.

WHEN RETIRED DETROIT labor educator, author and union activist Steve Babson became exasperated by the casual use of the term populism to include both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump he decided to compile a short history with graphics, noting:

“‘Populism’ in today’s a-historical rendering has become little more than a handy pejorative, a Halloween costume of dangerous and hidden potentials, used to vilify rowdy commoners when they challenge favored elites ... many pundits will address any protest against elite opinion in the same scary costume. ‘They must be populists! Circle the wagons!’” (48)....

Towers of Ivory and Steel:
How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom
By Maya Wind
Verso, 2024, 278 pages, 29.95 paperback

ALL TWELVE OF Gaza’s universities now lie in ruins, destroyed within the first 100 days of Israel’s ongoing military assault. According to a United Nations report, as of April, Israel had killed thousands of students and teachers as well as 95 university professors.

These numbers are undoubtedly higher at this point. The authors of the report further stated that “it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known a ‘scholasticide.’”....